A Summary of My Career Interests Thus Far

Ominous prologue, the early 1990s: My grandfather, Herbert L. Forsythe, Sr., had an Atari 2600.  From as early as I can remember, I was at his house watching and playing Kaboom! and River Raid in what were to become some of my earliest, fondest memories.

My senior year in high school, I had to decide which colleges I wanted to apply to.  The one self-evident rule in this process was to first decide what job I’d like to have, and figure out a good school from there.  I decided I would become a Graphic Design major, because there was money in it and I liked making websites.  Looking back, these decisions weren’t entirely solid, but I’ve always believed in having a concrete career goal despite any doubts, knowing that there’s still time to change paths.

That year, Senior Theology Teacher Mike Bouton invited John Coburn to speak to a few students.  John was an alumnus of my high school and had majored in ITGM at SCAD. (He currently teaches at ITT Tech in Bessemer.)  He talked to us about SCAD and about the game design program, and while I still wasn’t seriously considering ITGM at that point, it’s probably because of Mike Bouton and John Coburn that I’m at SCAD now.  My plan, anyway, was to go to SCAD and major in Graphic Design.

At some point that summer, I realized that graphic design made me want to kill myself.  When I got to Savannah, this revelation was reinforced by completely substanceless foundation design courses.  So I decided I’d major in Animation instead.  After all, I really enjoyed making dumb flash movies as a kid.

Still in my first year, probably sobered by drawing classes and the realization that animation involved a lot of drawing, I figured I probably wouldn’t enjoy it very much.  I had two other options that appealed to me more than Animation: Visual Effects and Interactive Design and Game Development.

VSFX, to me, was all the fun of Animation without the drawing.  I considered going into ITGM, but that wasn’t a real major.  Most of the ITGM freshmen I met chose their major based on the conclusion, “I like to play games, therefore I should make games.”  It was a Collins College major, and I had no interest in tightening up the graphics on level three.  Briefly, I decided on VSFX.

But a short while later, conveniently right before I had to declare a major, I came to a conclusion: There are people who make games.  It is a job that people do. And besides that, pretenses about game development programs don’t mean anything at hiring time.  Bottom line, I had enough self-confidence and enough faith in SCAD to commit myself to ITGM as a major.  Over the course of a year, I had gradually moved toward less established, less respectable disciplines.  But ITGM definitely felt like the right choice, and I don’t regret it.

I still lie when the lady giving me a $10 haircut asks what I’m majoring in, and I don’t like the non-academic “hooray let’s play carcassonne” attitude of the department, but in general my experiences in a year of ITGM classes have surpassed my expectations.  Game development education is still very young, and it will probably be exponentially better 10 years from now (though if trends continue, no one will be able to afford it then anyway).  In any case, I’ve no doubt learned a lot.  One key lesson is that as far as art school majors go, Game Development is no less legitimate than any other.  What matters is what you put into it as a student, and ulimately how good you are at the job you want to do by the time you graduate.

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Within the discipline of game development, I decided that I wanted to become an environment artist.  I enjoy 3D modeling, and I’ve always been inspired and impressed by the things I see at sites like polycount.  I was also considering level design.  The distinction between the two is that environment art involves designing and creating the 3D art assets to be used in a game, whereas level design is the process of creating the space in which gameplay occurs, placing and scripting obstacles which make use of the game’s mechanics in order to challenge the player in fun and interesting ways.  In a way they’re closely related, but they require very different skill sets.

What drew me to environment art is that it requires a lot of technical skill and artistic ability, and those are things that you can easily see.  If you want to demonstrate to someone that you’re a good artist, you show them your portfolio and they can instantly determine whether you’re good at what you do.  In level design, there is no such convenient metric.  Fun is a more abstract concept, and you have to actually play through a level to know if it’s worth anything.  Also, any idiot can figure out how to put boxes together to make a game map, but proper modeling/texturing/sculpting has a steep learning curve, and it seemed like a good idea to have successfully breached that barrier to entry as proof of my ability.

After a couple of quarters in ITGM, though, it didn’t take me long to realize that it wouldn’t pay to base long-term career goals on frivolous assumptions like those.  I’ve been trying to feel out level design and environment without too many preconceptions.  Lately, one thing has really tipped the scales toward level design.  I’ve been working on a single-player map for Half-Life 2.  It’s been a whole lot of fun to create a world and come up with inventive challenges.  Last night, after spending all day working in Hammer, I realized that it was 4am and I hadn’t eaten in 10 hours.  I haven’t experienced that feeling in years, and I think it’s a true indicator of where your passions lie to see what completely absorbs you and makes you lose all track of time.

I still really enjoy environment art.  If I hadn’t taken such a circuitous route in deciding on a major, and if it hadn’t been for excellent foundation drawing classes, I probably wouldn’t be anywhere near as competent an artist as I am.  There’s still plenty of room for improvement, and I plan to continue.  But as of right now, with another quarter or two left to change my mind, I can’t help but see level design as the most appealing career goal.

Maybe the very reason I’ve been so easily drawn to level design is that any idiot can put boxes together and make a map.  There’s no massive barrier to entry, but that’s an altogether good thing because it allows a level designer to block his ideas out quickly.  There’s a level of challenge and complexity far beyond blocking out a space and throwing in NPCs.  Creating a convincing world that supports gameplay systems, scripting events and NPC behaviors, optimizing levels to run efficiently, and making levels fun are all things that I can get behind and that I enjoy immensely.  I’ve come to realize that there are plenty of things that separate good levels from bad, even if, unlike an environment art portfolio, you can’t tell just by looking at them.